The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition - Hardcover

Oberoi, Harjot

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195632885 ISBN 13: 9780195632880

Publisher: OUP India, 1994

Synopsis

Early period Sikh tradition did not show much concern in establishing distinct religious boundaries. However, a dramatic change is ushered in with the rise of the Khalsa in the eighteenth century; sections of Sikh population now consciously begin to push for a distinct and separate religious fluidity and diversity within Sikh tradition. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the Singh Sabha, a wide ranging religious movement began to view the multiplicity in Sikh identity with great suspicion and hostility. The social and cultural forces unleashed by the Raj helped the Singh Sabha's powerful project to recast Sikh tradition and purge it of all its diversity. It established a highly systematised discourse of what it meant to be a Sikh. This volume is a study of this transitional process: of how one religious world view was replaced by another.

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Review

"A valuable contribution to the study of the nineteenth-century Sikh tradition and its formulations of modern Sikh identity. Oberoi's book serves as an excellent starting point in an ongoing debate on the process of identity-formation in the Sikh tradition."--Religious Studies Review

From the Back Cover

In this major reinterpretation of religion and society in India, Oberoi challenges earlier accounts of Sikhism, Hinduism, and Islam as historically given categories encompassing well-demarcated units of religious identity. Through an examination of Sikh historical materials, he shows that early Sikhism recognized multiple identities based in local, regional, religious, and secular loyalties. As a result, religious identities were highly blurred and competing definitions of Sikhism were possible. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, the Singh Sabha, a powerful new Sikh movement, began to view the multiplicity in Sikh identity with suspicion and hostility. Aided by cultural forces unleashed by the British Raj, the Singh Sabha sought to recast Sikh tradition and purge it of diversity, bringing about the highly codified culture of modern Sikhism. A study of the process by which a pluralistic religious world view is replaced by a monolithic one, this book questions basic assumptions about the efficacy of fundamentalist claims and the construction of all social and religious identities.

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP India
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0195632885
• ISBN 13: 9780195632880
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 516